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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> Have you really used a desktop Linux desktop recently?

Someone has to say this literally any time someone mentions problems with Linux Desktop, along with "it works for me", "my grandma uses it!", "you just have to buy the right hardware", and "you're using the wrong distro". It is incredibly tiring.

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It's a reply to the tiring cognitive dissonance of posts like GP that basically broadcast that 'oh, I would simply love to support open software and general-purpose computing instead of locked-down proprietary platforms, but alas, Linux is simply unusable you see, so I have no choice!'

Yet rather than take at their word that Linux is unsuitable for their use case or seek to remedy those problems, people insist that it must be because of one or more of the reasons I listed above. Alternatively, they attempt to change the user's use case to one that fits Linux better.

It's extremely tiring to watch this happen for as long as I have been watching it happen.

They didn't say Linux is unsuitable for a particular use case or give any meaningful criticism or definition of a use case, they just said that it 'just doesn't work'. Is it any wonder people call out that tripe.

The implication being that it doesn't just work for them. They know that, that's why they asked if they'd personally tried Linux lately. Nobody cares if it "just works" for your grandma or whatever, because that doesn't help them at all.

'just doesn't work' and 'doesn't just work' are two very different statements. You said the former, but I've only spotted people saying the latter in here.

Also if you have to argue with someone that linux does work for them, you've missed the point.

Ah yes you're right, I did misread that.

Are you actually seriously of the belief that Linux ‘just works’ for most use cases or people, and there is a small minority for whom it doesn’t?

Linux is hardly unusable, it's just a worse experience, and for something I spend 10 hours a day on and earn my living with, I want the best experience.

For macOS, you also have to buy the right hardware. You cannot throw it at random $300 Acer garbage either.

You probably could if they'd let you heh, it's really well optimized, and works great on 5 year old Apple hardware with much worse specs than a $300 modern Acer. This is especially true as low-end cheap devices tend to be much more "standard" -- no exotic hardware.

You would either not even boot due to buggy UEFI implementation, or it was cheaping out on some hardware that there is not driver for anything except the OS release it came with.

In some aspects, the hardware on high-end-insh laptops have moved nowhere in the last few years. Yeah, they've got slightly better GPUs to handle 4k, Vulkan/SPIRV and new media codecs, and faster SSDs once they've got rid of SATA, but the CPU performance moved just in percents and it comes with the same memory. My wife still uses 2012 i7 Thinkpad (T430s) with 16 GB RAM, and there are not many cheap machines that could be objectively called better. Certainly not in the $300 range. Heck, until Ice Lake, you couldn't purchase a laptop with more RAM unless you went into luggable workstation segment, so it is no wonder that MacOS works relatively OK on 5yo machines. They are still way better than $300 Acer, despite that Acer having possibly some better paper specs.

How good the specs are doesn't matter for most driver bugs. Instead, it's important which components you use. And even if cheaper devices use "standard" hardware, they still use a much larger variety than the few models that Apple releases.

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